


Unsteady

by ishouldwritethatdown



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Blindness, Dreams and Nightmares, F/M, Hospitals, Love Confessions, Post-Promised Day, Sappy, Tragic Idiots Being Tragic, Truth Being A Dick, also Breda is there briefly but just breifly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-08
Updated: 2018-04-08
Packaged: 2019-04-20 09:47:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14258307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishouldwritethatdown/pseuds/ishouldwritethatdown
Summary: He keeps trying to open his eyes. It's foolish, but every few minutes, and whenever he drifts out of a doze, he tries to see. As if he just wasn't trying hard enough the last few billion times, and he'll suddenly, by some miracle, be able to see his Lieutenant by his side again.There are no such miracles. They both know this. They always have. Instead, his boyhood fear of the dark has come to reclaim him, and the sun won't rise to dissipate it in the morning.





	Unsteady

The white void was, if not a nice change, at least an interesting one from the inky black nothingness Roy Mustang was barely used to.

He twisted and turned, trying to catch sight of anything that would break up the monotonous blank slate. His dark hair swished in front of his eyes, and when he reached up to brush it back, he stopped and stared at his hand. There was a dead-straight line in the centre of his palm, still a little swollen from all the blood rushing to the wound. He turned his hand and observed the matching line on the other side, cutting through the long-since faded transmutation circle he had cut into it.

It was a novel thing, to be able to examine these wounds.

He lowered his hand and looked once again at the colossal gate in front of him. It was just like he remembered, made out of something like polished granite and covered in wheels and script that he’d never thought he’d see outside of his own notes again.

He waited to see if it would open. The void seemed to buzz with energy, but it didn’t move.

“Did you really think you would get off that easy?” asked many voices at once. Some of the syllables had a familiar inflection to them, each from a different source, but he didn’t waste time trying to sort that out.

Truth’s eyes were unwavering and sure. They were focused and unrelenting.

They were the eyes of a killer.

“What more to you want from me?” he demanded, before he realised he was saying it.

“Such arrogance,” they tutted. “To believe that you deserve any less of a toll taken than everybody else.”

His protests faltered and fell in his mouth. His hands began shaking, and he tried to stay them, tried to fix Truth with the same stare they were giving him. “What’s the rest of my toll?” his demand kept the same tone, the same unsquashable hint of terror.

Truth just grinned. Grinned with their killer’s stare.

“Hey.” Roy could hear the gateway behind him groaning for his return. He could feel the Truth crawling up his back, but he kept his eyes fixed on the cruel smile in front of him.

“No. Leave her alone.”

Everything he deserved started grabbing onto him, wrapping itself around his limbs and dragging him backwards.

“You leave her alone!” he yelled.

One of the little hands tried to turn his chin into the gaping eye behind him, but he fought to keep staring straight ahead.

“She’s not part of it. It was my mistake! Leave her be!”

Grin. Stare. Darkness began enclosing on both sides.

“Lieutenant! No! Lieutenant!”

He watched the dark start to obscure the Truth. Their black focused eyes didn’t break from his until the last sliver of light was obliterated by the dark, and then he was falling.

“Lieutenant!” he cried, moving with a sudden jolt that made the blood rush to his head. He could feel the sweat sticking him to his sheets, the grease in his unwashed hair. His eyes swivelled around naturally, but there was nothing to see.

“Lieutenant, are you there?” he asked, trying to hide some of the urgency that had laced itself through his words. “Hawkeye!”

“She’s there,” said a voice.

Roy’s hand tensed, and for a second he cursed what an idiot he was not to have his ignition gloves on – the realisation of who was speaking came before the one that he didn’t need his gloves any longer.

“She’s sleeping,” Breda said. “You want me to wake her?”

Roy exhaled. His heart was still hammering. “No. No, it’s alright. I… sorry.” He put a hand to his face, trying to hide the fear from Breda while he got it under control. He’d already seen it to be sure, but it wouldn’t do for a Colonel to be so vulnerable around his subordinates.

“What do you need, Breda?” he asked.

“I actually came to see if you needed anything,” he replied. He said it in that casual way he did, like he was just doing his job. Roy appreciated that. He didn’t think he could deal with any mushy-feeling treatment from his men right now.

“No, I… I’m fine,” he said, without thinking about it properly. He was still too scrambled to think about the long-term right now. He could hardly bear to think about anything he wanted right now.

“Okay,” Breda said, in a way that meant he was shrugging and adding, “Your loss.”

Roy angled his senses to where Riza was as best as he could remember. He hoped the disorientation would go away soon. He tried to listen for her breathing, but it was hard. There was a lot of ambient noise in the hospital that seemed suddenly hard to sort through.

“Is she really alright?” he asked. The question that passed his lips was supposed to be a thought, but it came out, quiet. His chest clenched in guilt.

“Yeah, Colonel. She’s gonna be fine,” Breda said. There was no accusatory tone in his voice. None of the teasing he sometimes gave out, either. He answered it like it was a fair question, like Roy was fair to ask it.

That made him feel worse.

He clenched his fists around his sheets and lowered his head. He hoped his hair was covering his eyes, which was an odd thing to hope. Or, he thought it was until they started to prick with tears.

Breda didn’t say anything. The room was quiet for a while, until Roy’s grip slackened and he had successfully fought the water back into his eyes.

He heard the chair Breda was sitting on creak, and then a sigh. “You know…” he started, “no one would blame you.”

He let his head sink lower. “For what.” He didn’t say it like a question.

“Never mind.” He started walking towards the door.

“2nd Lieutenant Breda,” Roy said, lifting his head and putting all of the Command back into his voice that he thought he could manage.

“Yes, sir?”

“There is something you can do for me. I need you to gather all the material you can find about Ishval,” he said.

“You mean about the War, sir?” Breda asked.

“No,” he clarified, “about the country. Before and after. I’m going to need to brush up on my knowledge before I start trying to fix this country.”

He heard his heels come together in a salute. “Right away, Colonel.”

He heard the door click shut and slumped his back again. He started running his fingers over his hand. He tried to tell if he could feel the old transmutation circle there, underneath the slug of a scar that was still full of stitches. He shut his eyelids, and wondered if he was going to develop the ability to sleep with his eyes open.

He dozed for a while, every now and then becoming aware of how clammy he felt under his sheets, or a pain in his forehead like the crackle of gunpowder. He felt like he was straddling in the dark. There was nothing to tether him to the world except his bed, and that kept feeling like it was spinning.

“Lieutenant, are you there?” he asked, groggy. He fought the urge to grope around in the dark.

He had no way of telling what time of day it was, or even how long he had been in the hospital. It could have been hours, or it could have been weeks. Did nighttime even exist in hospitals? It hadn’t seemed like it the last time he was here. Even less so, now.

“I’m here,” she said. Faraway, like in a dream. He was dreaming… he’d certainly had worse dreams. Her voice was a compass to him; she kept him bearing in the right direction, always. He was grateful to have her near. 

Guilt swamped his clouded mind again. That was unfair. He was being unfair to her, keeping her tethered to him like this. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled, but it didn’t have the weight behind it he meant to give it.

“I told you, Colonel, you don’t need to apologise,” she responded.

She thought he was talking about her injuries. He should have been. She was hurt because of him. She almost died because of him, because he was too easy to read, because he hadn’t protected her well enough, because because because…

_I can’t afford to lose you_. That’s what he’d said. It was what he’d meant, too, but he couldn’t understand now how he’d said those words. How he’d ever managed to force them out of his mind and into the open air.

He couldn’t be vulnerable like that if he wanted to change this country. He couldn’t have weak spots. But here he was, groping around in the dark for his subordinate because she was his guiding light.

Guiding light. _Ha_. He was going to keep doing that, wasn’t he?

He needed her with him. As long as he was dreaming, there was no harm in that. Can’t be caught in a dream. Can’t cause damage in a dream…

“Riza,” he said, and as long as he was dreaming that couldn’t do any harm at all. He reached for her voice. “Riza,” he said again. _I love you_.

Couldn’t do any harm in a dream, to say I love you. But he held his tongue. To say it, even in a dream, felt like crossing a threshold he shouldn’t tread.

Her hand slid into his. “I’m not going anywhere, sir,” she said.

What a nice thing for a dream to say.

\---

Riza was not going to let go for anything.

The Homunculi’s Father could come barrelling into the hospital with a brand new Philosopher’s Stone and she’d keep one hand in Roy Mustang’s while the other put ten rounds in his face.

Every time she thought about his hand swaying in the gap between their beds, trying to bridge it, a forbidden whisper on his lips, her breath caught in her throat again.

She hadn’t called him Roy in sincerity since before the academy. She wasn’t sure he’d ever called her just Riza. She was _Ms. Hawkeye_. She was _Lieutenant_. She had never been _Riza_.

Except, apparently, she was. Somewhere in the Colonel’s brain, somewhere vulnerable and permanently on lockdown, he called her Riza. She could tell by the easy way that it came off his tongue that it wasn’t new to him. It was normal and domestic and something they would never be allowed to be. A fantasy of his, a world where he could call her by her first name and take her hand in public.

It made her heart hurt; it ached, plain and simple. That this was what they both wanted, that they had the same selfish craving, and that they had to choose a different path. She tried to rationalise it; neither of them would be able to enjoy this fantasy world if they didn’t do their best to correct the wrongs they’d committed in reality. And the way to do that involved eliminating the path towards their fantasy world, and that was just going to have to be okay.

It would just have to be.

For now, though, she could hold his hand. While he was disoriented and dreaming, and everyone was too confused and emotional to give a damn, she could at least have this. She rolled his name around in her mind. _Roy_. She’d drilled it out of her head when she signed on to be his Lieutenant. Occasionally one slipped through the cracks, like after she was undercover as Elizabeth and she’d let herself get used to it.

She could remember biting down the wrong exclamation when he collapsed in the Third Laboratory, clutching his scorched side. She’d had time, when she ran to him, knelt by him as he winced, to expunge the name ‘Roy’ from her mind. He was _Colonel Mustang_.

They didn’t do first names, not ever. If it was going to be any day, it should have been yesterday. All the turmoil and chaos, it would have come out then, when she was about to lose him, or he was about to lose her. But it hadn’t. They’d kept their arrangement, screaming each others’ ranks instead of their names. Even if they were staging a coup and getting vengeance for Hughes and saving the country, they were at least going to be professional about it.

“Lieutenant,” the Colonel had said. His face had been serious, determined. “Would you take my arm? I’d feel a little more balanced.”

“Of course, sir,” she’d replied. One hand on his shoulder, the other on his bicep, and suddenly he’d had a sureness about him that she hadn’t noticed he’d been missing.

“Good thing I’ve got the Hawk’s Eyes doing my spotting,” he’d quipped, although he’d been sincere too. He added with a slight strain that anyone else might have missed, “This actually could be an upgrade.”

They’d got through all of that without slipping once. And then he went and blurted her name half-asleep like an idiot.

Riza squeezed his hand, her mind a million miles away in that world of theirs where they could steal a kiss without a trace of guilt, where she could wrap her arms around him and hold him close.

They knew what they meant to each other. They could say in a casual meeting of the eyes. The same way a real couple could say _I love you_ with a peck on the cheek, they could say it with a look.

The receiver for that message was broken. Now he had to say it with a smile, with a hand reached out, with a whisper of her name. And how would she say it back now?

The steady sleepy breathing didn’t lose pace, keeping him in dreamland. Roy squeezed her hand back.


End file.
